I really didn't think I was saying anything contentious in my post. My point was just that no academic specialty - physical science, social science, theology or whatever, should try to impose its own usage (which it is quite justified in maintaining by consensus in-house) on other specialties, or on the average person in the street. Ideally we would not have conflicts of technical terminology and would all be sensitive to the context of other people's speech in order to discern which possible meaning a word like "evolve" was intended to have. Gen.11:1-9, however, suggests that this isn't going to be accomplished just by a bunch of academics getting together for a conference! I'll respond to specific points below.

---- Gregory Arago <gregoryarago@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Hi George,
>
> I'm really glad you've said this. Surely I do agree with what you say here. It seems to contradict what you have said elsewhere, however, which is what is at issue.
>
> Simply noting that technical usage differs from everyday speech is obvious (I'm speaking with you here, and not with Mr. Dehler). You seem to support the 'natural-physical scientific' view of 'science' (which of course I do as well). The second part of this, however, is that you also seem to devalue, disregard or even implicitly to claim that the 'human-social scientific' view of 'science' and 'nature' is invalid. I would be pleased for you to clarify yourself on this and to show if I've misread you or exaggerated your position. In other words, the fact (and it *is* a fact) that human-social scientists commonly use alternative opposites to 'nature' and 'natural' than *just* 'supernatural' is something that you don't seem to give voice to or to openly validate.

I don't see how you draw the conclusion that I reject HSS usage within that field from my post. I only said that scholars in that area shouldn't expect or assume that others will use language in the same way.
>
> To say this another way, I am fully justified (please tell me if you think otherwise) in calling out a non-human-social scientist for saying 'Evolution of Evolution" *is* good language usage, when in fact he (or she) is in no position to authorise it as such. If this is so, then really, what you've said George, proves my point and validates my objection to Randy Isaac's belief that 'evolution of evolution' is good language usage by natural-physical scientists. It was not, is not and will continue to be 'bad' usage, along the same line that Moorad objected to it as 'not science.'

I got into the thread on the Washington conference a bit late, at the point where you were criticizing the claim that "ideas" evolve. I explained why that claim is quite legitimate in common English, with citation from a recognized authority on the language. I assume that "evolution of evolution" means that our understandng of evolution - i.e., an idea - has changed over the past 150 years, which of course it has. Now if "evolution of evolution" is supposed to mean that the evolutionary process itself changes - well, it does but I would agree that saying that it evolves is at least confusing.

>
> Do I understand your position correctly as follows: you are suggesting that natural-physical scientists may operate on the presupposition that "the *only* opposite possible to the term *natural* is the term *supernatural*" and that this view may be 'right' (i.e. not 'wrong') *inside* natural-physical sciences (but not right *outside* of them). Is this correct?

It's not so much a question of whether the view is correct as how the terminology is used. A physicist or chemist, functioning soley as a specialist in one of those fields (whose boundary is pretty vague!), will, if asked to discuss the human brain, treat it entirely as a "natural" entity - ~1.4 kg of complex organic molecules, EM fields &c. Some may also say "that's all there is" - i.e., the brain (& by implication the mind) is "nothing but" a natural entity in that sense. But a physical scientist is not compelled to adopt "nothing buttery" unless he/she is (to use a phrase of one of my doctoral profs) a pinhead.

> Let me be crystal clear on this because it seems I am being constantly misinterpreted about my position. I fully agree that natural-physical scientists are under no cumpulsion to abandon 'evolution' or 'natural selection' (although they ought to admit more regularly that it is a very fuzzy concept duo that appropriates a discourse of 'agency' taken from human-social sciences) if they 'fit' appropriately in their field (which they *seem* to). But natural-physical scientists have *no authority* to press human-social scientists, as the sociobiologists and eVo psychologists have done, and it is wrong to say something like 'evolution evolves' or 'evolution of evolution' because it is speaking as an outsider to the proper domain.

I've commented on this above. Let me add - it seems to me that there is an appropriate way to speak about "cultural evolution", recognizing that while that concept has some commonality with that of biological evolution, it can't be reduced to the latter. I gather you don't like the idea of cultural evolution (& in fact may have gone ballistic as soon as I mentioned it :).) Perhaps you could comment.

> "no single academic discipline should expect everybody else to adopt its conventions." - George Murphy
>
> This statement applies to biologists, of course, as well. Do you realize how *many* biologists have expected everyone else to adopt their conventions with the ideology of 'evolutionism'?!?

I agree.

> Also, George, you wrote that there are more types of 'evolutionism' than just the (neo-)Darwinian variety.
>
> ""Evolutionism" - i.e., evolution as a grand metanarrative - need not be Darwinian." - George
>
> And then you named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was disciplined for his views by the Roman Catholic Church because they were possibly inconsistent with Christian theology, while you suggest they *are* consistent with Christian theology. We will have to have this out one day George because Teilhard is a controversial figure and his process-orientation is *huge* in his approach.
>
> Question: What do you call those other 'kinds' of evolutionism, other than Darwinian and Teilhardian? You pluralised the word 'types' above and I am reading carefully and asking accurately and for accuracy. Please use another Title for another type of 'evolutionism' than either of those two.

Obviously we need to try to reach some common agreement on what we mean by "evolutionism." In one sense the idea that everything evolves (i.e., everything is always changing) goes back at least to Heraclitus. I use the term, as I said, to mean "evolution as a grand metanarrative", as an overarching philosophical principle or, to borrow a term from speculative physics, a "theory of everything." Such theories may be "naturalistic" - i.e., may hold that the observable universe is all there is and that "evolution" is the grand theory that explains it all - e.g., Dawkins. Such naturalistic evolutionisms do tend to be "Darwinian" because the idea of natural selection seems best suited to rule out anything "non-natural" & thus to serve as what I called a universal solvent. But I can't see any fundamental reason why there couldn't be a Lamarckian version of naturalistic evolutionism.

But there is also process philosophy, which can be understood as a kind of evolutionistic theism. Here it is not only the world but God who is involved in process or, if you will, evolution. Teilhard's theology is often classified as a variety of process thought, though it differs in significant ways from that of Whitehead. One crucial difference is that Teilhard was Christian & Whitehead wasn't - though other Christian thelogians have used Whitehead's philosophy. & while Teilhard can't be said simply to reject Darwinian ideas about the mechanism of evolution, he isn't very enthusiastic about them.

So I think there is a spectrum of views that could legitimately be called "evolutionism." It certainly isn't just Darwin or Teilhard.

> As an aside, I would argue that it was not Teilhard's 'evolutionism' that was 'distinctively Christian,' but rather Teilhard himself who was Christian. Likewise, Darwin's 'evolutionism' was not religiously agnostic, but Darwin himself was. Your position on Teilhard's 'evolutionism' is not yet clear to me, George, as I'm sure neither is mine clear to you since we haven't discussed it that much. Perhaps this is also partly why you ?

The very fact that Teilhard sees evolution as being directed toward "Christ-Omega" indicates that there's something distinctively Christian about it. I've commented a number of times on what I see as + and - about Teilhard's though - most recently in my post to Schwarzwald last night. & I've never said that I "refuse to take the label of 'theistic evolutionist'." I've said that it's not a label I apply to myself if I have time or space to explain my position more fully. But I won't leap up & hotly deny it if someone refers to me as a TE.

> Just for the record, I was in a book store today and picked up McGrath's book "Christianity's Dangerous Idea' to find a section on 'evoloutionary theology' (or 'evolutionary theism,' I forget exactly), which he used in the same way some TEs here have described TE. I like McGrath's priority language usage better than TE. But E.T. is already a common acronym!
>
> Gregory
>
> p.s. the U.S. Open tennis final happening live right now between Federer and del Potro is AMAZING - 5th set, davai del Potro!!! (I've been writing this message during the breaks...)